0x02 Blehh

It's a weird year. Summed up in one word it would be: lethargic. It feels like somebody removed my brain and replaced it with cotton wool. Between anxiety, deaths in the family, health scares and issues, and a pretty overwhelming lack of executive function it feels like I've accomplished very little since my last blog post.

I finally got a UPS on the server rack. Took a little north of $1200, but it works, and now I don't live in fear of powerloss. I still need to get around to building out the orchestration piece. In short it will be a server running NUT as a service monitoring for power loss. When a power-outage is detected it will begin a timer and then begin gracefully bringing down infrastructure if power doesn't return in time. I need to sit down and write out logic flows. Things like
1. how long to wait before starting the shutdown of VMs
2. what happens if power returns once this process starts
3. how to reliably bring systems back online when power returns
Probably a few others besides. The APC UPS I got is pretty high end, and has a network module, so I have a fair bit to work with. Just need to work with it.

I actually needed to look into my server to even remember other things I've worked on, it's been that long.

So I finally got Rhasspy halfway working as a voice assistant on Raspberry Pi! It isn't great, but I got Spotify integration going and voice commands, and really those were the hills I wanted to clear. Then I stopped working on it because I had a cloud of things to work on at the time, and that seemed good enough.

Home Assistant was the back-end to that, and in that vein I also automated power to the roof heating lines based on weather pulled from various APIs in Home Assistant. It looks ugly, but it worked all winter, so that was nice.

I did a bunch of stuff in very short order with Yubikey. Password vault integration, PGP integration, PGP-to-SSH integration, OATH TOTP. It was a significant upgrade to my security posture. I wish the PGP-SSH things were more reliable, but it's still super new and I feel like there are some issues getting the newer hashing and signature algorithms to work on some of my older server installs. Honestly I should just upgrade and replace the older servers, but I'm not motivated at the moment.

The other server I was playing around with deploying was Mattermost. It's a self-hosted Slack/Discord-like application which shows a lot of promise. I had a plethora of issues getting the right version installed (their site is not very clear on links or versioning), and once installed it all worked very well, except the voice/video components. Some oddities with my setup really don't play well with WebRTC. Unfortunately I haven't had the time or inclination to bash my head against that problem again, and without the most significant feature I haven't felt like trying it out with friends.

Looking forward then, it's almost convention season. Last year I duct-taped two old-ass wifi routers together and got a half-decent solution to some wifi restrictions at a resort we attend. This year I want to go a step further. I have that raspberry pi and I plan to get it operating as a wifi client/AP/VPN/media thing for our room. It will almost be comical how much will be going on with this, but it looks like a fun project. The only other thing in the pipeline is getting my storage server upgraded. I'm below 2TB, and really need to drop some drives into it.

Outside of the technical I just need a break from unexpected things. It's wearing on me.
Entity.